Juggling several email inboxes can be a hassle. Luckily, all the main email providers — Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo — let you combine your email accounts into one single inbox, to send and receive email all from one place on the web.

Under Accounts and Import > Check mail from other accounts, click Add a mail account. A pop-up window will open up where you can enter your other email address.

Gmailify

With some email platforms, the process is simplified with a tool introduced last year called Gmailify. When adding your Yahoo, or Hotmail/Outlook.com address using the method listed above, Google will ask you if you would like to use Gmailify to link your accounts. In this case, you’ll just have to log in using your email account credentials, but you will have to grant Google full access to that account.

Next, you will be prompted to enter the password to the account you want to add to your Gmail inbox. Other information relating to the server and port are usually pre-populated for you, but in some cases you will have to enter them manually. If you’re adding a work email, be sure to get these settings from your tech administrator.

You will receive a verification code sent to your secondary email address. Depending on your email provider, this might end up in your junk folder. Once you enter that verification code in you should be able to send and receive emails directly in your Gmail inbox.

Using Alternative Email Addresses

When composing a new email, you should now have a drop-down menu in the From field where you can choose which address to use to send a message.

If at any time, you want to remove those accounts from your Gmail, just go back to Accounts and Import > Check mail from other accounts and click delete or unlink.

Like with Gmailify, you will be granting Outlook access to your Gmail account. Outlook will be able to read, send, delete, and manage your email messages. For other email accounts, you will have to enter your email address and password, and may have to also enter your POP/IMAP settings manually. (If you’re unsure of these settings, don’t check the box that says Manually configure account settings and Outlook may be able to automatically detect those settings.)

In both cases, you can choose if the imported mail will be in a subfolder of its own, or into existing folders, and you can also create custom labels.

For all non-Gmail accounts, after going through these steps, you should receive a verification email at your secondary email address to allow you to send emails from your Outlook account.

Like Gmail, you’ll be able to select your sent from address using a drop-down menu from the compose window.

You’ll see all added accounts under Manage your connected accounts. You can also edit, refresh, and delete accounts using the buttons directly above the list of email accounts.

Click the gear icon and select Settings. Go to the Accounts tab and from there you can add other accounts or mailboxes.

Click Add another mailbox and a popup window will open up with five options: Yahoo, Google, Outlook, AOL, and other. In the case of the first four, you will simply have to log into that account using your credentials and grant Yahoo access to that account.

Once you’ve logged in, you can select the name you will use when emails are sent from that account through Yahoo, as well as a inbox name. That inbox will now appear directly under your main Yahoo inbox.

If you want to send an email from your Yahoo inbox, make sure you have that inbox open. If you want to send it from a connected account, make sure you have the inbox of that account open. You cannot select the address you are sending from in a drop-down menu like you can in Gmail or Outlook.

To remove an account, go back to Settings > Accounts and click on the email address you want to remove and click Remove inbox.

Mail Forwarding

It’s also worth noting that if you don’t want to access your email accounts using POP you can always use the workaround of forwarding your emails to your primary inbox, given you provide access to send email as that account. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo all provide users with the email forwarding settings.

Gmail

In Gmail go to Settings, and select Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Under Forwarding, click Add a forwarding address. You can then just add the email address you want to use as your primary inbox and be sure to click the verification email that you receive.

Outlook

In Outlook, click the Gear icon and select Options. Go to the Forwarding tab under Accounts.

Yahoo

With Yahoo, click the gear icon and go to Settings > Accounts. Click on the Yahoo email address at the top of the Accounts tab. Scroll down to the end of the screen and you can enter a forwarding email address. You can also choose to mark forwarded emails as read in your Yahoo inbox.

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Steven Schoch

February 26, 2018 at 12:17 am

For some reason, I can't connect another Yahoo email to my primary Yahoo email. (I already have 2 others linked. It says "3 of 50 used.") When I click the "Add mailbox" button, as you describe in your Yahoo section, it gives me the screen titled "Select email provider", but Yahoo is not listed - only Google, Outlook.com, Aol., and "Other".

I have nearly 30 emails with a different host like gmail, outlook, yandex and etc... Any idea how could I combine all of them without using apps or windows clients? As far as I understood outlook and Gmail have limites :/

I started with one email address & ended up with several. I had different emails going to different addresses. Total waste of time, so now I have everything forwarded to my original address which is Outlook (formerly Hotmail) and I use rules to pop them into different boxes.

Good aricle :) I have followed your directions to send/receive my sky.com emails from my Outlook(Hotmail) account. The only problem is that Outlook(Hotmail) has saved the new sky account as David Morrison (on behalf of ...@sky.com) so emails are received from ...@hotmail.com on behalf of David Morrison (...@sky.com) not simply from David Morrison (...@sky.com) as I was expecting? Any thoughs?

Hello Nancy Messieh,
It is the biggest advantage of Outlook to configure multiple accounts in a single inbox. But it can lead to duplicate e-mails in Outlook inbox folder. So you must have basic awareness about how to remove outlook duplicate Emails to avoid redundancy.

And two things I particularly like about my Outlook (2007) desktop client that no online client has (that I know of) -- and few offline clients have -- are: 1) Auto-correct when composing messages and 2) the ability to edit the subject and/or the body of *received* emails.

Re: the latter: though I'm something of a read-and-delete emailer half the time, I do, nevertheless, save a lot of incoming mail. And I can't tell you how many emails I have gotten that had either a vague, deceptive or missing subject. I'm sure it's the same for us all. Well, rather than going through the trouble of 'forwarding to self' or opening the message in a text editor for editing and saving, with Outlook one just changes the subject and saves. Presto !

With these two features, I'm really liking using Outlook 2007 for managing my email accounts.

{Of course, having said all this, I realize that the emphasis of this article is not so much "online clients vs. offline clients" as it is about "checking webmail accounts individually vs. checking them in one central webmail location." But the content of some of the comments so far does go to show that, despite its popularity, webmail has not fully replaced offline email client use. :-) }

Of course - that's what desktop clients are for - but this is a good way of getting away from having to use extra software, or be able to access all of your email accounts in one place no matter where you are.

Nancy is a writer and editor living in Washington DC. She was previously the Middle East editor at The Next Web and currently works at a DC-based think tank on communications and social media outreach.